More of Moore

The trailer for the new Michael Moore documentary Sicko is now available on line. The film, set to be released at the end of June, is in the words of Moore, "Sicko is a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth."

From the trailer, you can see that Moore is at his muckracking/populist best. Scenes include him on a boat outside of the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp with a number of rescue workers from the 9/11 tragedy who are unable to afford medical treatment while the terrorists who are inprisoned there are able to get it free.

The film also includes Moore's trips to Canada, France and the UK to find out why those countries health systems are so much better than the one in the United States.

The trailer also makes effective use of the Rolling Stones' song Street Fighting Man. A song Rod Stewart also did a great version of on his debut album An Old Raincoat Will Never Let You Down.

Top 5 Rod Stewart albums
1. Every Picture Tells A Story
2. Gasoline Alley
3. An Old Raincoat Will Never Let You Down
4. A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse (with the Faces)
5. Ooh La La (with the Faces)

It is an interesting time for Michael Moore because a lot of the right wing media has spent the last number of years trashing him as a quack who releases slanted documentaries with a left wing agenda. Much effort was done to discredit his earlier docs Bowling For Columbine and Farenheit 9/11. Though I thought some of the 9/11 was a bit too slanted and did not have the brilliant impact of Columbine, Moore is still the most important documentary filmmaker of our generation. And so what if his films have a slant, that's why people make documentaries. To tell a story the way THEY see it. And those two films are the highest grossing documentaries in the history of film. So someone is watching them.

Moore's latest controversy, according to wikipedia, relates to some of the filming he did for Sicko. The Office of Foreign Assets Control informed Moore that he was the subject of a civil investigation stemming from the filmmaker's March trip to Cuba. In the letter to Moore, a Treasury official noted that the department had no record of Moore obtaining a license that authorized him to "engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," alleging that Moore violated the United States embargo against Cuba.

A master copy of the film is being held outside the U.S. in case American authorities attempt to seize the film as part of the criminal investigation against Moore that arose from taking American 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for medical treatment.